“The Death of Mystery” in the Age of the Blackberry

I recently joined the mobile web wielding hordes: I received a Blackberry.  My employer decided to upgrade and…well…I’m now one of “those people.”

I received the device about a month ago, and days later I was with my family for the Fourth of July.  One night after dinner, sitting around the large and ancient oak table, my 92-year-old grandfather asked if I had heard about an ambidextrous pitcher on the Yankees.  I hadn’t heard a thing about it*, and Grandpa couldn’t remember where he’d read about the athlete.  Imagine his shock when, across the dinner table, I reported the details of Pat Venditte: a truly ambidextrous pitcher, currently in the Yankees’ minor league system, who wears a special 6-finger glove so that he can slip it on either hand.  I even related a story from an article I found Googling “ambidextrous yankees pitcher” (it’s a fascinating story, and worth reading).

I read this story aloud from my little black box and a conversation that might have ended with “That’s interesting–I’ll have to look that up when I get home!” instead concluded with six people walking away from the table with the full story.

My grandfather, for his part, was impressed and glad that I’d uncovered the information he remembered vaguely.  My grandmother (God bless her, the most stubborn person I know, but also the most interesting) reacted differently: she lamented, more than a little seriously, the “death of mystery” inherent in on-demand web access from the beach, the bar, and even–when appropriate–the dinner table.

I think this is actually a manifestation of a pretty common generational difference: some people, principally older folks, relish the quest for information.  They take pride in working for their knowledge: digging through a dusty bookshelf to find a specific book with a description of the bird they see in the back yard, or looking through the recycling to find a newspaper article they read days before.  This quest for information makes uncovering even trivial information–like the difference between sherry and port wine…true story–a triumph.  The “mystery” my grandmother refers to is, I think, actually the satisfaction that comes from resolving a perplexing question or investing time in finding an answer.

By contrast, I feel like people of my generation relish the ease of uncovering information.  Our triumphs more frequently stem from being the first at a table of iPhone/Blackberry-wielding peers to uncover an answer on Google; NOT from investing the most time and effort to find the same information.  We value and reward efficiency in resolving “mystery,” trivial or otherwise.   When handed a research task at work, many twenty-somethings will search the web before EVER digging through a hard-copy resource.  There’s no joy, from our perspective, in wasted effort that culminates in the same information.  It strikes me that many of the most successful companies and innovations in my lifetime–Google itself as the obvious example–have streamlined this quest for information even further.

Part of this divide is clearly the tools available: I’m spoiled by my Blackberry, and I have learned to place a high value on at-my-fingertips information just as my grandmother, armed with an encyclopedia, a dictionary, and an extensive collection of reference texts, learned to value the search itself.  But I wonder if it isn’t more than simply tools.  And I wonder if our impatience and high expectations for the availability of information (how many of us consider searching the web for 10 minutes an eternity if we can’t find the information we need) mean that we are actually losing something.  Any thoughts?

*As a Red Sox fan, I tend to avoid all Yankees-related news items; this is one of the few times when I’m glad I broke my own rule.

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user sh1mmer.